Guess who’s back in the muthafuckin house
With a big fat dick fo’ yo’ muthafuckin mouf

Gather close, and let me tell you a tale of bullshit and chicanery which began back in my youth, in the summer of ought-three. Or something like that. Whenever the kids’ project started.

In the course of putting together said project, we had to guide Wormtongue through the process of “making something”. Part of “making something”, we explained, is “user testing”. “User testing” is important, because it will let you know if your “audience” is actually interested in your “silly bullshit(tm)”. Wormtongue hummed and hawed, then agreed to help recruit users for the focus groups we proposed.

We said great, and put together the methodology (i.e., what was going to be tested and how) and the data collection (the stuff that the monkey running the tests had to write down in order to help form conclusions). Very simple stuff, really - what any company does prior to releasing a product, whether it’s toilet paper or multimedia wank. So we put the thing together, and left the Wormtongue to recruit people into the focus groups.

A year and a half passed.

Why? Because the Wormtongue isn’t able to get his paperwork straight. He gets shot down by an ethics review board multiple times, and stalls out the entire project for a year and a half.

Finally, the day arrived when we were allowed to run the tests. I supervised, with Baracus reading the scripts I had prepared and writing down feedback. When it was all said and done, they had failed to recruit enough people to have any kind of confidence, but we said fuck it at that point and moved forward.

In the background, Baracus and Wormtongue decided to write and publish a paper on the focus groups, in a feeble attempt to justify their use of resources on the planet. Which is totally ludicrous to begin with…it’d be like someone trying to write up a focus group for the aforementioned toilet paper and get it published in an academic forum.

But I digress.

After a further year and a half, the first draft of the paper arrived on my desk last week. It’s 20-something pages long, and utterly fucking hopeless. A claim is made that a sample size of 1 has reached redundancy. The conclusions are all off the mark. There are serious factual errors throughout. The copy is sloppy, and in some places incoherent. I’m listed as an author…as is every pseudo-academic attached to the Wormtongue’s department. And the Riddler. Yes, the Riddler is listed as an author.

At this point, I was faced with a choice. Try to correct the paper, or just remove my name and let the entire awkward, wretched mess be shat into existence on the deserving pages of a useless journal. I chose the latter. Yank me, says I. Give me a shout out in the acknowledgements as the dude that put together the methodology and data collection, and we’ll go our separate ways.

Except, of course, that the sorry PseudoAcs see this as a chance to try to delete my presence from the paper entirely. I’m given a totally generic line that makes it sound like I mopped the floor. I balk, and lay out the wording for my acknowledgement. This prompts the (perhaps foreseeable) usual stupidity.

I get a call from Baracus. She tells me that they are concerned that the publishers won’t publish the paper if the person acknowledged as the designer (ugh) of the methodology and data collection isn’t an author. I tell her that it’s my choice to not be an author - and I definitely don’t want to be one.

Wormtongue sets her up to question whether I was actually involved in the way I claim to have been, and I lay burnination about me. The rewriting of history is licked with the holy flames of my self-righteous indignation. Wormtongue and Baracus retreat, looking for a way to send the paper out without acknowledging that none of the listed authors actually did anything at all.

And so we wrestle a bit more, and come up with nothing. And the rough, retarded beast continues to slouch towards Bethlehem.

In the words of Handy (the interim nickname for our new production guru), “It just all seems so desparate.”

Amen to that.

Commentary

I weep for you. The Riddler and Wormtongue authoring an academic paper. It makes me want to build a log cabin of my own shit, tightly mortared with sprays of slurry, go inside, swing shut the stinky door and create a muddled puddle of tears and feces.
- Shuh